A Tree Grows in Upper Montclair
On my walk yesterday, I saw a tiny garden that gave me pause. Perhaps “garden” is too generous; it was actually a disorganized collection of plants growing in wheelbarrow full of soil. At first, I thought the use of a wheelbarrow as a rustic planter was deliberate, but when I noticed that the largest plants in the wheelbarrow were seedlings from the fir tree above, it became clear that the owner had used the wheelbarrow for some yard work, and then simply abandoned it long enough to develop its own ecosystem.
Most interesting of all, the wheelbarrow was the most attractive part of the yard, which the owner spends at least some effort keeping up—the yard isn’t neurotically manicured, but the lawn is mowed, the flowerbeds tended, the picket fence in good repair. Yet a random collection of wild plants was the prettiest part of it.
I wonder why. None of the plants were traditional flowerbed material; mostly, it was a mix of grasses, with some wildflowers and a few seedlings. My perceptions are not overly colored by an environmentalist’s love of nature for its own sake. Sure, I like hiking the woods once in a while, but any given patch of it just looks like mud and gravel and detritus; prairies are just a patch of weeds, viewed from close up.
In the absence of a better explanation, I chalk it up to the way that contrast draws the human eye. Contrast is no more inherently pretty than is nature, but when the contrasting element looks nice, setting it apart from the surroundings makes it seem much prettier. A miscellany of 4” to 6” plants the size of a yard would just look trashy. But a mound of earth can look lush and cool toward the end of a walk in hot, hazy, sticky weather.